Blueprint Revealed For Low Carbon Exeter

Exeter City Futures reveals its Blueprint for a low carbon Exeter, outlining exactly what needs to happen to achieve a carbon neutral Exeter by 2030.

Featured around the world for its focus on building a low carbon economy which benefits all citizens, Exeter City Futures hopes the blueprint can be adopted by other towns and cities wanting to transition to low carbon.

The Blueprint is launched ahead of Net Zero Exeter, the festival empowering businesses, organisations, and communities to take up the low carbon challenge.

Exeter City Futures (ECF) have revealed its Blueprint for a low carbon Exeter, setting out a specification for all the things that Exeter will need to have in place to become carbon neutral.

One of Exeter City Futures key objectives, tasked by Exeter City Council, is to develop the roadmap for a carbon neutral Exeter by 2030, a responsibility that ECF have accepted with pride. The Blueprint, free to download and read on the Exeter City Futures website, is the vital first step on this 10-year journey to ensure lasting transformation, ensuring informed and collaborative conversations.

The final roadmap, to be launched at the Net Zero Exeter Summit on the 26th March 2020, will set out a shared plan of all deliverables that will need to be met and an estimate of the investment that will be required to ensure that Exeter becomes, and is in a position to remain, carbon neutral.

“Exeter City Council have declared a climate emergency and are committed to making the city of Exeter carbon neutral by 2030. Exeter now has the opportunity to show leadership among cities through decisive implementation of policies, innovations and investment that shape the way we live and our environmental impact for decades to come. Most of us already know what needs to be done, but it is vital everyone understands the scale of the challenge ahead; this is the purpose of the Blueprint. To achieve our goal, we will require strong collaboration and collective action from everyone across the city; individuals, businesses, community organisations and the local authority. The next step is to agree on a shared roadmap for practical action.”

The Blueprint is dedicated to four core themes which Exeter City Futures has identified as critical for a city to become low carbon: energy, mobility, sustainability, and capability. While it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that a smart city will naturally make a city low carbon, Exeter City Futures recognises the need to keep sustainability at the core of activities – and the prioritisation of mobility and energy is to ensure the city continues to prosper.

Alongside The Blueprint is Exeter City Futures’ provocation and conversation starter for Net Zero Exeter, hosted on March 26th, 2020. This festival is a mobilisation summit to empower the Exeter community to have honest conversations about the barriers to achieving carbon neutrality, and how everyone – institutions, businesses, communities, individuals – can play their part. The summit will provide plenty of opportunities to explore ways in which the city can best achieve this globally important objective.